March 5, 2006 Sermon Notes

What is prayer?

"Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from Him anything we ask, because we obey His commands and do what pleases Him. And this is His command: to believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as He commanded us." –I John 3:21-23

1. Privately and personally –Matthew 6:5-6
2. Humbly –Matthew 6:7
3. Honestly – Matthew 6:8

• Our Father … (Not mine alone, but ours together)
• In heaven … (Creator and Sustainer)
• Hallowed be Your Name … (He is holy.)
• Your kingdom come …
• Your will be done … on earth as it is in heaven. … (Let my life reflect You.)
• Give us today our daily bread … (One day at a time)
• Forgive us our debts … (Forgive me.)
• As we forgive our debtors … (Forgive others.)
• Lead us not into temptation … (Protect me.)
• For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.
  (This phrase added later by Christians in the early church.)

The Morning Meditation …

Peace is the imperishable constant Christ provides our agitated souls. It causes us to remember that nothing is so out-of-control that it is beyond God's control. The world is not perishing; the skies are not falling. The fetid waters of our oasis have been sweetened to a drink of life. Peace is not the result of being able to shut our ugly circumstances into a throw-away container. Peace is the ability to accept His finished work on the cross even as we live through our current circumstances.

The martyrs often had more peace than those emperors who sentenced them to death. This is the classic meaning of Paul's advice to the Romans: "Consider yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6;11). All He really meant by this is that dead men and women do not have a long profit-and-loss ledger. They can lose nothing of value, since nothing that can be held in the hand of a corpse has any value at all. You cannot threaten the dead.

Would you like to learn a song of peace that can quiet the riot of your hassled existence? Then ask the faithful martyrs of old. Peace of them was not the absence of war. It was not even the absence of threats. Peace was a lifestyle they manufactured from a worldview Jesus gave to them. The world could not take it away from them, since the world had not given it to them. "Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Your heart must not be troubled or fearful." [John 14:27]

–from The Christ of Easter by Calvin Miller